Sidewalk For Game: How to handle lines between blocks?

allengingrich

How are these normally handled? I've made a substance for my concrete, but I'm unsure how to add the lines inbetween blocks. Would I model them, then bake them down to normals/AO; leave them modeled; work them into my substance somehow?

I know there are tons of ways, but I'm asking how would you do it?

throttlekitty

I'd continue in substance. Make a small border around the whole thing to handle the tile marking, mix in a little dirt and call it done.

Mant1k0re

I assumed it was always done in the texture but it looks like even in recent console games the trend is to actually model them, at least when the sidewalk system is modular. It wasn't the case for GTA V as far as I could see but in Fallout 4 each curb piece is actually geometry. I figured if it's okay to do something like this on XBOne or PS4 nowadays there's probably no reason to just fake it with a texture. Depends on your platform of course but unless we're talking mobile pretty much anything will process a hell of a lot of vertices at runtime.